The ninth annual Tribeca Film Festival boasted numerous science fiction, environmental and adventure films. Here are three to look for in theaters.

Into Eternity

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There are nearly 300,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the planet, stored in above-ground facilities where they are vulnerable to natural disaster and war—not to mention all the expense for security and maintenance. The government of Finland has come up with what it thinks is a permanent solution to the problem of nuclear waste: Bury it 1600 feet under the ground in bedrock. They're calling the facility Onkalo—or "hiding place"—and this is the subject of director Michael Madsen's documentary Into Eternity, which has its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

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Upon completion, Onkalo will be 1600 feet deep and hold all the nuclear waste from the plants that currently exist in Finland. Excavation is currently at approximately 1100 feet—about 500 feet shy of where the waste will be stored. Fuel rods will be placed in a steel canister surrounded by copper, then deposited in holes lined with clay. When the facility is full—officials think that will be around 2100—it will be sealed. During the course of filming, Madsen spent plenty of time in the tunnels. "You really go deep down in to the bedrock," he says. "Your ears pop and you can feel the sheer weight of the rock above you. One time I got a very serious ear infection and cold because it's not a place for humans to be."

It wasn't Onkalo's engineering that first caught Madsen's attention, but how long the facility would need to exist: 100,000 years, at which point it's thought the waste will no longer be harmful to humans, animals or the earth. (The pyramids, some of the world's oldest known structures, are only 4500 years old.) "I thought, 'How do they relate to that time span at all?'" he says. "I also supposed that there would be some kind of consideration for how to inform the future. I also thought that humans won't be the same 100,000 years from now—they'll at least be thinking differently." He was surprised to find that the people in charge actually weren't thinking about communicating the facility's true nature to the citizens of the future; instead, they want Onkalo to be forgotten entirely. "They're not really interested in this communication aspect," Madsen says. "It's much easier to talk about nuts and bolts and reinforced concrete with titanium. But in my mind, the real safety issue is human curiosity."

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Could humans in the future come across Onkalo and open it up, exposing themselves to deadly radiation? If we do mark it with what we hope is a universal message conveying the danger of the facility, will future civilizations believe it's a holy site—like the pyramids—and open it up anyway? Madsen thinks both possibilities are plausible, and that there's no easy solution. "The most extensive studies I quote in the film, from the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, ask if it's possible to ensure that we can communicate into deep time, and that this communication will keep humans from opening this facility," Madsen says. "The answer to both questions was no. It's not possible on scientific grounds to say that. That means you can't claim that it's foolproof. But if you're saying it's best to be forgotten, you have to assume that it actually works for 100,000 years, that there will be no problems. And we won't know until 100,000 years from now if it actually works."

Metropia

In the animated conspiracy filmMetropia, Big Brother is watching you. But it's not the government; instead, it's a transportation company that uses shampoo to infiltrate the brains of the populace. The technology even allows operators to speak to the people whose brains they've infiltrated. It's the groundbreaking animation in Metropia that makes this movie a standout. "We used the software the wrong way," director Tarek Saleh says. "That's the basis of our technique."

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Saleh and his animators built the characters in Photoshop out of hundreds of layers—the eyes themselves have over 30—then animated those layers in After Effects. "We used an old plug-in that we tweak and sort of turn layers off and on and move them to create the illusion of them being alive," Saleh says. "I call it Septo 3D. It's like those early computer games where you're driving a car. It's not really 3D, but it looks like you're moving forward. It's the same technique, an optical illusion. For example, if the character turns his head, we move his eyes, his nose, his ears at different speeds to create the illusion that he's turning."

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This technique—which Saleh had used before on a few simple short films—gave him a lot of control. But the going was much slower than a live-action movie or even a typical animated flick. "Each animator produced about 12 seconds a week," he says. "As a director on an animated feature, you work in slow motion. Normally you'd shoot two or three scenes a day on a live action film. I briefed 3 minutes of film every week. Then after briefing it, it takes maybe two weeks before those 3 minutes are handed in by the 20 animators."

Actress Juliette Lewis, who voices Nina, was drawn to Metropia specifically because of its unique animation style. "It blew me away because there was such frailty and humanity to these characters," she says. "Then I went and visited their little elf workshop where all the animators were, and they showed me the process. I had never seen anything like it, so I fell in love with that."

Into the Cold

In his documentary Into the Cold, photographer and filmmaker Sebastian Copeland set his sight on an audacious goal: traveling by foot to the North Pole. "This is the gold standard of polar travel," he says. "It's considered widely to be the toughest expedition on Earth. It's one of the least accomplished missions on foot. And it's one that's more and more fleeting, because it's alleged that within a short amount of time the conditions at the pole will make it impossible to undertake this kind of long-term journey."

To prepare for the 35-day expedition, Copeland headed to Minnesota in the dead of winter, where he dragged a 200-pound sledge through snow. Though the weather was warmer than it would be in the Arctic, the training prepared Copeland for the journey in other ways. "It prepared me in the sense that I could train with polar sleds and do my walking with 200 pounds and going over basically a lot of lake terrain, which is a bit like the Arctic environment," he says. "And then do things like jumping in the frozen water, which is as much of a stunt as it is psychological training. It's designed to remove the psychological block of what it would be like to fall in water that way—to remove that moment of panic and get you into the mindset of action." It's a piece of training that definitely came in handy: Copeland actually did fall into the drink when on his way to the North Pole.

With Copeland facing 40-mph headwinds and rough terrain, filming became a huge challenge. "Anytime you film it's a pretty miserable experience," he says. "You have to stop and pull the camera gear out of the sledge and then you get cold, because you're dressed to be warm when you're at full exertion, but not so warm that you sweat. When you're at full exertion and then you stop, your core temperature drops quite rapidly and eventually you're just cold standing. Every time you film you also have to take your gloves off, so you're left with thin liners at 30, 40 or 50 below. It's a challenging experience when you're handling a camera that's a hunk of frozen metal." He filmed with a Canon straight from the factory line that was capable of taking 1080 HD film and 21 megapixel stills. "It's a remarkable piece of gear," he says. "Without it, I wouldn't have been able to shoot a documentary."